For four decades in the second half of the 20th century, Ingmar Bergman crafted cinema that made us passionately believe movies were art--maybe even a sort of religion. One long pilgrim's progress, his films were filled with fanatical God-hunters, alienated artists and actors, white and black magic, haunted dollhouses, and enchanted theaters-in-the-round. Celebrant of the imagination's power to kill and to create, he treated us like fellow travelers, equally hot on the trail of truth and beauty. Despair abounded, armed with teeth that lacerated the soul--in contrast to the easy angst in which we postmodernists wallow. Lapsed Lutheran auteur, Bergman gazed unrelentingly at spiritual landscapes--faces as well as places--bent on illuminating Godforsaken terrain in the wintriest cinematic light.

An artist who loved women, albeit ambivalently, this unsunny Swede cast shining stars such as Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann as the muses, Madonnas, and medusas his tortured doppelgängers embraced--and sometimes brutalized. Having retired from feature filmmaking in 1982, eightysomething Bergman recently handed off to Liv Ullmann--a former lover, now a director in her own right--one of his most painfully autobiographical scripts: Faithless is the golden child born of their tangled liaison as lovers and collaborators. Its aesthetic DNA can be traced to fundamental forms and themes in the Old Master's lifework, softened and redeemed by Ullmann's remarkable faith in forgiveness.

Half a century ago, Bergman fell deeply in love with a married journalist whose husband bartered custody of their children for one last, unwelcome fuck. When she confessed her terrible violation, the filmmaker exploded in jealous rage. Though they later had a child, the couple's relationship never recovered from Bergman's self-absorbed betrayal. In Faithless, a white-haired, worn-faced filmmaker ("Bergman," in the credits) conjures up a collaborator, Marianne (Lena Endre, current protégée of stage director Bergman). Through this possible phantom, or lovely fortyish actress auditioning for his new movie, he plays out his memories of old, catastrophic infidelity.

Marianne narrates the story, shifting verbally from past to present tense, visually from her creator-confessor's cloistered writing room into the "movie" of years-ago adultery. Beginning with the sudden shock of recognition that casts her conductor-husband's best friend David (Krister Henriksson) into brand-new light as a potential lover, she relives the whole arc of faithlessness, from giddy sexual trysts to shattering exposure and finally appalling loss. As the privileged light in the old man's study alters, so does Marianne's face--at first unengaged except as partner in spinning memory, then drawn deeper and deeper into despair, and ultimately released by their exorcising drama.

Impossible to say how consciously Ullmann taps into her creatively incestuous relations with Bergman, and the characters she brought to life for him (especially the wife in Scenes from a Marriage). Faithless mirrors what Ullman learned in acting out Bergman's dreams, and somewhere in the darkness/light generated by those collaborations lie the shady origins of her estimable art-making. But we must wonder at that old wizard behind the screen, putting words into his surrogate's mouths, encouraging someone else to pull the strings of his puppets. Is he impotent? Incubus? God? Does Bergman look to acolyte Ullmann for absolution for his sins against that other, earlier lover?

In an astonishingly revelatory performance, Endre's Marianne therapeutically presses her tale toward catharsis, thawing her audience (Bergman's frequent alter ego, Erland Josephson) out of affectless grief into cleansing tears. And yet once all the actors have left the stage, Ullmann's camera lingers on the old man's desk, marking a miniature music box, a drawer full of mementos--and what appears to be a neatly stacked script. Was the tragedy retold and reenacted here a sacrament of contrition, or catalyst for aesthetic creation?

Typically in the world of Bergman, the fracture of faith occasioned by Marianne's affair with David affects larger ground than the marital theater. The "family" of man that's deconstructed even unto death in Faithless is composed of whole and conflicted artists--Marianne is an actress, her husband Markus a musician, and her dangerous lover David a filmmaker. (Even Marianne's little girl tells herself increasingly gothic fictions and moves in solitary dance.)

While Markus (Thomas Hanzon) finds sustaining joy in his music, David carries a cancer of blighting self-consciousness. Dissociated from his own experience, he sees himself as an actor in a play, watching himself performing. When Bergman's society-in-small becomes infected with metaphysical despair and shame, the function of art as well as love degenerates--and that, in this context, is the beginning of civilization's decline. And as the possessor of the purest, most undefended imagination, it's Marianne's child who's most martyred.

Early in the film, husband, wife, and best friend lounge on living-room couches, discussing a trip to Paris during which it's already been scripted Marianne and David will betray trusting Markus. Little Isabelle crawls from her father's embrace to her mother's arms and finally into David's lap. The cheery lies that will kill all her happiness poison the air; oblivious as a kitten, the child moves from warmth to warmth. Ullmann's camera stands back--unmoving--to frame a last picture of community before the fall. In this cinematic confessional, actions matter. The central act of betrayal is like a stone cast into water; the expanding circles of consequence and guilt engulf all of the players in the Ullmann/Bergman Magic Lantern Show. An admirably unfashionable movie on so many fronts, Faithless counts morality as a possible virtue, values the fragile complexity of human beings, and mourns the ease with which we break each other.